Forget Godard: The Cinematic Abductions of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Guy Debord
[Title: In which the concepts of the “différend” and “abduction” relate to the cinematic works of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Guy Debord.]

In writing on the cinematic practices of Pier Paolo Pasolini and Guy Debord, a pattern of sorts began to unravel as questions began to surface, and through that pattern and questioning the contentious debate over modern cinema emerged. At first, I had no conceptual framework to sustain the relationship between the cinematic works of Pasolini and Debord, except for their uncanny similarities in arguing that the modern “spectacle” was a social technology of “false progress.”
As I delved further into their theoretical and cinematic works, however, a tension of disputes ensued, a tension that held the cinema as a discursive entity. It is through their disputes, their acts of practicing and writing on (and against) the cinema, that Jean-Luc Godard materialized as another protagonist in their critique of modern cinema. For it was through their discourses against Godard’s cinematic work that a critical conflict emerged on the nature of cinema’s role as a medium: What was it for? How was it used? Why was it used?
In the disputes of Pasolini and Debord against Godard, a mutual exclusivity occurred, a conflict of interests that could not be resolved: the cinema became a contentious and discursive site of inquiry and practice. The cinema became, in Jean-François Lyotard’s term, the différend. A différend is a conflict that cannot be resolved because of a “lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments.”[1] Modern cinema, then, was the site of unresolved conflicts because it lacks a “rule of judgment”—it is an entity that is unstable because of its discursive nature through the disputes it elicits.
Modern cinema is talked about, written on, and argued over, but the cinema, as a medium, is the différend—an